Being a science writer, I spend most of my time reading, digging for stories and finding out what is going on internationally. Wild Reading is about sharing these amazing snippets. Some of these are linked to stories I’m working on, some are just strange things that have found their way onto my computer screen. All…

Being a science writer, I spend most of my time reading, digging for stories, finding out what is going on internationally. When my partner and I finally sit down to the dinner table, one of us usually asks, “So what did you learn today?” Wild reading is about sharing these amazing snippets (like did you…

A lot of research papers find their way onto my desk and off it. Some make you think “wow that is incredibly cool”, some make you wonder where people get the funding to study the obvious or arcane. But every once in a while, there’s an article that makes you wonder whether you are in…

Whenever something goes wrong in my daily Johannesburg life, my mother — who I misguidedly call for words of comfort and solace — tells me that that’s what I get for “living in a place of wickedness”. (She harbours not-so-secret hopes of getting me to move to her bucolic paradise in deepest darkest Eastern Cape.)…

There is an ongoing debate in science journalism — the question of whether you can write science PR for corporates or government and also write science journalism for media houses. If you want some background, here’s an interesting piece in Nature and another blog post. While the IT industry learned about these blurred lines a…

Women, thank your lucky stars for oestrogen. There has historically been a perception that women handle stress and general panic better than men, but new research from the University of Buffalo now proves it and points to a reason. According to the animal study published in Molecular Psychiatry on July 9, it’s all thanks to…

It’s days like today that I miss the Greek and Roman pantheons. It was the golden age of star, planet and galaxy naming. Mars, Saturn, Andromeda … they were myths written across the skies. These days, it’s a collection of someone’s name, numbers of letters – thoroughly unromantic … unless of course there was a…

It’s a dog-eat-dog world. Or, in this case, it is usually a sheep-eat-plant world. But in Chile, sometimes the plants eat the sheep. When I first read that, I thought I was being had, that I would excitedly tell people about this carnivorous plant with a taste for sheep and be told I was wrong….